I finished playing Lost: Via Domus this week. I started to play it just as a fan of the show, but I wound up writing the review as well. And in that review, I had to be careful when discussing the ending -- to me, it's a big part of the game, but I obviously didn't want to give anything away.

But this is a blog post, so I feel no such responsibility. Consider everything that follows in this post to be a total spoiler.

Seriously, don't keep reading unless you're up to date on the current TV season of Lost and you've either played Via Domus or you simply want the ending ruined, because that's where we're going.

Okay. There's quite a bit of buzz about the ending. Before I even got the game, our contact at Ubisoft said that she'd heard it was a doozy. Didn't matter how good or bad the game was at that point -- as a fan, I was going to play it through. Was it really going to be a big twist, something important to the mythology of the show, or was this PR puffery?

Then, as I was playing, someone else told me, "I got to the ending...it was a total cop-out. Like, the one thing you wouldn't want to see them do? That's what they did." Uh oh.

So, I get to the end. Elliot gets on the boat. He starts to sail away. He hears a sound, looks overhead, and there above him is a rapidly disintegrating Flight 815 -- the same bird he flew in on. And then he blacks out and wakes up on the beach. And who wakes him up on the beach? Lisa -- the ex-girlfriend that he betrayed and ultimate got killed.

Was it all a dream? That would be a total cop-out and a huge disservice to fans in a game that was all about fan service. That's why it doesn't make sense as an explanation, to me. I saw the ending differently, and I think it was actually way more important than the "dream theory" suggests.

Locke's always on about the island being a second chance, right? And if you're up-to-date on the show, you know that there's a time anomaly involved -- Daniel's mortar arrives 30 minutes later than it should, and we have a few people running around the island who apparently haven't aged in years. So I took the ending to mean that Elliot realized what a jerk he was, took responsibility for his past actions, redeemed himself (albeit with the cheesy, throw-yourself-in-front-of-the-explosion action sequence), and earned forgiveness from the island. So, his dimensional time bubble reset -- you aren't exactly out of trouble, because you're still waking up on the beach after a plane crash -- but Lisa's alive, which means, okay, you learned something, so let's reward you a little and try again. Your karma just leveled up.

All the other tidbits revealed in the game -- nerve gas, Savo, ESP experiments -- are teases that will likely bear fruit as the TV show reveals its secrets (and recent episodes have mentioned that there is a toxic gas refinery on the island -- this game's release date was not accidental, but more likely perfectly timed with the show's storyline). But this big ending, to me, tied in with a lot of the "alternate dimension/stuck in time/redemption" theories that I've been considering with the show, and it made sense as a huge revelation about how the island might work.

I might be giving a low-quality game too much credit. Maybe it's just a dream. Maybe, like Mulder from the other recent sci-fi show that inspired obsessive fans, I simply want to believe. But for all the things I didn't like about Lost: Via Domus, what I did dig was the story. Elliot's narrative didn't unfold with the standard gaming cliches -- he's not a superhero like Master Chief; he's not even noble. He's kind of an asshat. He's selfish, before and after the crash, and Jack hates him. He really only does one good thing to make up for his past sins. The gameplay was tired but the story had some surprisingly fresh elements to it. They treated Lost fans (if not hardcore gamers) with respect up until the end; why wouldn't they take it all the way?

So I think it's an important ending -- as tantalizing as any of the other Lost cliffhangers that have kept fans interested all this time, and maybe a true insight into what the hell's going on on the island. Until proven otherwise, I'm going to believe.